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Eliott's hand, and laid her head back upon the cushion and cried. "Dear," whispered Mrs. Eliott, with her inspiration full upon her, "you will always have her." Then Anne sat up in her corner, and put away her tears, and controlled herself to speak. "Fanny," she said, "Dr. Gardner has seen her. He says I shall not have her very long. Perhaps a few years if we take the very greatest care "
Eliott's dinner-party as he had never disported himself in Parliament. Majendie had given him a career, endowed him with glorious attributes. The ex-member, as a topic, developed capacities unsuspected in him before. The others followed his flight breathless, afraid to touch him lest he should break and disappear under their hands.
They talked about the Eliotts, for the Canon's catholicity bridged the gulf between Thurston Square and vociferous, high-living, fashionable Scale. Eliott from St. Saviour's to All Souls. He hoped also to win over Mrs. Eliott's distinguished friend. For the Canon was mortal. He had yielded to the unspiritual seduction of filling All Souls by emptying other men's churches.
Eliott's room in Thurston Square, of the bookcases, the bronzes, the triptych with its saints in glory, and of how Fanny sat enthroned among these things that reflected completely her cultured individuality. Fanny had counted. Her rarity had been appreciated by the man who married her; her tastes had been studied, consulted, exquisitely indulged.
She must never be overtired, never excited. We must never vex her. He says one violent crying fit might kill her. And she cries so easily. She cries sometimes till she's sick." Mrs. Eliott's face had grown white; she trembled, and was dumb before the anguish of Anne's face. But it was Anne who rose, and put her arms about the childless woman, and kissed and comforted her.
A messenger had been sent off on the same day from Madrid, ordering the cessation of intercourse with Gibraltar and, had he not been detained by accident on the road, he might have arrived during General Eliott's visit to the Spanish lines; a fact of which Mendoza had been doubtless forewarned, and which would account for his embarrassment at the governor's call.
But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them for an instant. He must give them up. She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined, after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.
But for almost all of them one of Captain Eliott's outbreaks was nearly as distasteful to face as a chance of annihilation. As soon as he had come up quite close he said, mouthing in a growl "What's this I hear, Whalley? Is it true you're selling the Fair Maid?"
Majendie was known in Scale by her broad charities and by her saintly life. She had fallen away a little from her friends in Thurston Square. In three years Fanny Eliott and her circle had grown somewhat unreal to her. She had been aware of their inefficiency before. There had been a time when she felt that Mrs. Eliott's eminence had become a little perilous.
There could be no criticism of these heights and depths. To have depreciated Fanny Eliott's rarity by a shade would have been to call in question her own. But all this had ceased long ago, when she married Walter Majendie, and his sister became her dearest friend. Fanny Eliott had always looked on Edith Majendie as her rival; retreating a little ostentatiously before her formidable advance.
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